Alternative Film Guide

The Amazonas Film Festival - Mundial de Filme de Aventura ("World Festival of Adventure Films") kicks off in the Brazilian city of Manaus, located in the heart of the Amazon jungle, on November 4 with a screening of Lasse Hallström’s An Unfinished Life starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman. Expected guests include Italian [...]

Quote: "The United States fears that South Korea will set an example of a country that succeeds in maintaining its own film culture and that other countries will follow us." South Korean actor Ahn Sung Ki, the leader of the movement to retain South Korea’s screen quota - 146 days a year devoted to South [...]

2005 Tokyo Film Festival Awards
2005 Tokyo Film Festival: October 22–30, 2005
 

 
Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix: What the Snow Brings by Kichitaro Negishi (Japan)
Special Jury Prize: Conversations with Other Women by Hans Canosa (United Kingdom)
Best Director: Kichitaro Negishi (What the Snow Brings, Japan)
Best Actor in a Leading Role: Koichi Sato (What [...]

The Australian Embassy in Beijing is sponsoring the 2005 Australian Film Festival, which has been scheduled on two consecutive weekends, November 4-6 and 11-13. The festival will feature several of Australia’s most important productions of the last five years, including Kevin Carlin’s The Extra, David Caesar’s Mullet, Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence, and Sue [...]

The 2005 UK Jewish Film Festival will screen more than 400 films, including Lajos Koltai’s Holocaust drama Fateless / Sorstalanság, starring Daniel Craig; Scott McGee and David Siegel’s The Bee Season, starring Juliette Binoche and Richard Gere; and Anat Zuria’s Sentenced To Marriage / Mekudeshet, a documentary depicting the the Israeli judicial system’s treatment of [...]

"Of course, it’s not my goal to shock people," says Gallipoli director Tolga Örnek. "But it’s my goal to display the conditions and how horrific it was, and I want to take the glory and the polish out of war, because when we glorify battles, when we mythicise, like make campaigns into mythical stories, I [...]

In American Heritage, Elizabeth D. Hoover reports on the surviving film palaces in the Los Angeles area, including the magnificent 1926 Orpheum, which, Hoover says, "has recently undergone a $3 million renovation and plays host to special events including movie premieres."

List of films submitted to the 2005 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award
AFI FEST 2005 in [...]

Weekend highlights at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival, currently being held at the Egyptian Theater complex on Hollywood Boulevard, include Antonio Dorado Z.’s El Rey / The King (Friday, 7:00p.m., at the Spielberg Theatre, and Saturday, 11:30p.m., at the the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre), a fictional tale about Pedro Rey, Colombia’s first drug [...]

It’s the final weekend of the London Film Festival. Highlights include Frank Capra’s 1932 Depression drama American Madness, starring Walter Huston, Pat O’Brien, Kay Johnson, and Constance Cummings; Sam Peckinpah’s newly restored post-Civil War Western Major Dundee (1965), starring Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, and James Coburn; and Cinema, Aspirina e Urubus / Cinema, [...]

Oct 27, 2005:
Tickets for AFI FEST 2005, to be held between November 3-13 at the Arclight Theater complex in Hollywood, are now on sale. With an eclectic lineup that includes a total of 92 features (75 narrative, 17 documentaries) and 35 shorts (27 narrative, eight documentaries), for a total of 127 films from 44 different [...]

8th British Independent Film Awards - 2005
The 8th British Independent Film Award nominees were announced on Oct. 25, 2005.
The 8th British Independent Film Award winners were announced on Nov. 30, 2005.
British Independent Film Awards 2005 Winners - Article
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

 
Best British Film
A Cock & Bull Story
* The Constant Gardener [...]

Thursday, October 27, highlights at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival, currently being held at the Egyptian Theater complex on Hollywood Boulevard, include Manuel Márquez’s Mexican documentary Ni Muy Muy, Ni Tan Tan - Simplemente Tin Tan (4:45p.m., at the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre), an examination of the life and career of the highly [...]

The Santa Monica Mirror remembers the Exiles, political refugees - among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann, Jean Renoir, Erich Maria Remarque, and Berthold Brecht - who fled war-torn Europe to the shores of Southern California.

More film/DVD news and reviews at the Alternative Film Guide

IranMania reports that Iran’s government has been blocking access to the site of the International Festival of Asian Cinema at Vesoul, France, probably because one of the themes at this year’s festival is women’s role in society.

AFI FEST 2005 in Los Angeles
Alternative Film Guide

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that a record fifty-five countries, including first-timers Costa Rica, Fiji, and Iraq — plus Palestine, Puerto Rico, and Hong Kong (which somehow still manages to get into the roster as if it were an independent state within China) — have submitted films* for consideration in [...]

Tuesday, October 25, highlights at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival, currently being held at the Egyptian Theater complex on Hollywood Boulevard, include Walter Carvalho and Sandra Werneck’s Cazuza - O Tempo Não Pára / Cazuza - Time Doesn’t Stop, which offers Daniel de Oliveira’s critically acclaimed performance as the iconic Brazilian singer Cazuza, [...]

Cristina Comencini’s La Bestia nel cuore / Don’t Tell (literally, "The Beast in the Heart"), has been chosen to replace Saverio Costanzo’s Private as Italy’s entry for the foreign-language Academy Award. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had rejected Private on the grounds that it had been filmed in a language other the [...]

David Rubien reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that New York trumpeter Dave Douglas and his band, Keystone, will provide the music for Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle films screened on Wednesday, October 26, at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival.
Arbuckle was one of the most popular film comedians [...]

"A film isn’t really preserved until you get to that point where you show it to an audience and get a reaction," says James Hahn, the 20th Century-Fox nitrate curator and vault manager at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hahn, who calls himself a "film archaeologist," is a silent film lover — [...]

The second presentation in the "Lost and Found" film series, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ new screening series of archival rediscoveries, will be the Gloria Swanson-Rudolph Valentino vehicle Beyond the Rocks, a 1922 production directed by Sam Wood (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, For Whom the Bell Tolls). Long thought lost, this romantic melodrama [...]

41st Chicago International Film Festival Awards - Gold Hugo 2005
The 41st Chicago International Film Festival ran from Oct. 6-20, 2005.
The 41st Chicago International Film Festival winners were announced on Oct. 15, 2005.
Chicago Film Festival 2005 Winners - Brief Article
 

 
INTERNATIONAL FILM COMPETITION
Gold Hugo – Best Film: Mój Nikifor / My Nikifor (Poland), directed by [...]

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association will give its Career Achievement Award to actor Richard Widmark, 90, at the group’s awards ceremonies in January. Widmark worked with top directors during his 45-year film career, including Henry Hathaway in Kiss of Death (1947), Down to the Sea in Ships (1949), O. Henry’s Full House (1952), and [...]

Krzysztof Krauze’s Mój Nikifor / My Nikifor won the Golden Hugo for Best Film at the 41st Chicago International Film Festival at Saturday’s (Oct. 15) award ceremony at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers. This Polish drama about a highly prolific folk artist - played by Silver Hugo Best Actor winner Roman Gancarczyk - beat 18 [...]

Adn Kronos International reports that Italy’s candidate for the 2005 Academy Awards, Private, has been deemed ineligible for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar because the film’s dialogue is spoken in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has asked Italy to submit another film. (Chances are the replacement will be [...]

As per the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF) website, the festival "is dedicated to presenting the best Latino films made in the US, Spain, the Caribbean, and Latin America." Certainly, one could argue about the meaningless label "Latino" - for instance, the original Latins are out of luck since no Italian films are [...]